Protect Your Land
What is a Conservation
Easement?
What is a Conservation Easement?
The short version
A conservation easement protects private land from development or other uses incompatible with your conservation goals. By granting one, you’re assured the conservation values of your property are protected in perpetuity — and you keep the right to live on it, farm it, sell it, and pass it down.
What you keep
- Ownership of the land — it’s yours, we never own any part of it
- The right to sell, mortgage, or transfer the property
- Continued agricultural and recreational use
- Use of existing buildings, without restrictions
- Income from traditional and sustainable uses
- Your privacy
What the easement limits
- Subdivision of the property
- Construction of new structures
- New impermeable surfaces
- Uses incompatible with the conservation values
- An easement should never be so restrictive that it makes the land a financial burden on present or future owners.
Our responsibility
- Annual monitoring site visits and reports
- Sign maintenance and landowner relations
- Easement defense, backed by Terrafirma insurance
- A non-wasting stewardship endowment for every easement
- Stewardship typically costs $4,000–5,000 per year, funded by an endowment of roughly $140,000 per property.
How the process works
STEP 1
Questionnaire & title
You complete a landowner questionnaire and share a current preliminary title report.
STEP 2
Site visit
We walk the property with you and talk through existing and potential future uses.
STEP 3
Board approval
An internal review goes to our board, which approves the project so we can formally engage.
STEP 4
Funding & recording
We pursue grant funding, then draft and record the easement. A retainer covers staff time.